Sanford shooting calls for FDLE investigation

After Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee's unrevealing and unsatisfying press conference Monday, residents were no less in the dark about what happened Feb. 26 within a gated Sanford enclave.

Several things are clear: Trayvon Martin is dead. George Zimmerman is the shooter. And police, Lee declared, "don't have the grounds to arrest him" for manslaughter.

Indeed, only dubious conclusions can be drawn from sketchy details so far released:

Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch captain, spotted 17-year-old Trayvon around 7:15 p.m. He reported a suspicious person on a nonemergency Sanford police number. With a squad car en route, however, police fielded 911 calls warning of a scuffle between two men, and gunfire.

Two minutes after his call, police found Zimmerman, who is white, bleeding from his nose and the back of his head. A gun was tucked in his waistband. Trayvon, a Miami high-school junior who is black, lay on the ground, bleeding from a gunshot wound.

Self-defense, Zimmerman claimed. And police say they have evidence that may back that up. The incident is getting national attention, in part because so many questions remain unanswered:

Why was Zimmerman armed? What made Trayvon — an invited guest who was visiting his father's fiancée as he had before — suspicious? What did Zimmerman do after a police dispatcher advised him to back off?

Why is a young man, who was unarmed, shot to death?

If nothing else, Zimmerman seems to have violated a core precept of Neighborhood Watch: look for and report crime. Watch groups, warns the National Crime Prevention Council's website, "are not vigilantes and should not assume the role of the police."

Sanford police are expected to turn their findings over to the State Attorney's Office, which will decide whether to prosecute Zimmerman.

That move — along with not arresting him — hasn't set well with some Sanford residents, including a man at the press conference who shouted: "The black community sees your department protecting the shooter."An understandable sentiment in Sanford, where the white son of a police lieutenant was given preferential treatment and let go by cops after sucker-punching a homeless black man outside a bar in December 2010. No discipline against the cops involved. That doesn't fill the community, or us, with confidence.

Lee would be wise to seek a set of fresh eyes that an independent probe by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement would provide.